Riverbed Technology announced that its Riverbed Steelhead
appliance running the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS) version 4.0 has
achieved SAP Certified Integration for third-party networking appliances that
interoperate with SAP solutions using the SAP NetWeaver platform and an
enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA). Enterprise SOA
enables customers to create a highly-flexible, open IT architecture for
developing services-based, enterprise-scale business solutions. With SAP's
certification of integration of the Riverbed Steelhead appliance, customers can
be assured of interoperability within SAP application-based landscapes.

"Over 3,500 enterprises worldwide rely on Riverbed's
solutions for the acceleration of the broad set of applications important to
their businesses, including solutions from SAP AG," said Venugopal Pai,
senior director, alliances at Riverbed. "In real-world tests, customers
running SAP solutions who have deployed Riverbed's WDS solutions have seen
performance improvements of up to 5X and reductions in data of up to 99%. With
SAP's rigorous testing of our products, these enterprises can now also be
assured that our products integrate with SAP solutions to reduce bandwidth
utilization and improve end-user response times."

SAP has added new network integration certification
scenarios around wide area network (WAN) acceleration and optimization to its
integration certification program based on increased demand by customers for
solutions in these areas. Certification was overseen by the SAP Integration and
Certification Center (ICC) and conducted at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Palo Alto, California.
The SAP ICC certification of the Riverbed Steelhead appliance running RiOS 4.0
was granted based on the following certification category: Network Performance
Optimization for Enterprise SOA. Within this category, the following was
tested:

Certified General Functions:

Functional correctness

Performance preservation

Secure, encrypted communication

Certified Performance Optimization Functions:

Reducing CPU load of SAP application server by 10% or more

Reducing end-user response time over WAN by 30% or more

Lowering bandwidth by 30% or more

Riverbed Appliances and SAP NetWeaver Performance

Steelhead appliances help accelerate application modules
running over WANs on the SAP NetWeaver platform. With Riverbed's WDS solutions,
organizations adopting enterprise SOA can achieve global network scalability
while improving accessibility to data and applications from remote sites. Steelhead
appliances cut the amount of time it takes to perform an array of operations on
SAP NetWeaver-based servers in a distributed environment to improve employee
productivity and better leverage an enterprise SOA.

In real world tests, RiOS helped enterprises eliminate up to
99% of traffic on SAP NetWeaver-based servers for specific application modules
resulting in an increase in bandwidth capacity of up to 17x. In addition, RiOS
accelerates HTTP and HTTPS traffic, which helps to further improve performance
of SAP NetWeaver over the WAN. The acceleration delivered by Riverbed enhances
the usability of platform applications and increases end-user satisfaction.

The above test results show that Riverbed Steelhead
appliances significantly accelerate specific operations of SAP NetWeaver over
the WAN, while also reducing bandwidth utilization. In recent tests, validating
purchase information was completed up to 5 times faster and saving purchase
orders were completed 3 times faster.

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